Lights On, Lights Out

Why we love it

What if you could distill human movement, ambition, and violence on our planet into one single picture? This story map accomplishes that. We love how it directly compares Earth at Night imagery from 2012 and 2016 to show new or extinguished nighttime illumination. We see an illustration of nighttime light’s dichotomous nature, its ability to reveal progress or tragedy. Notably, the map shows the light from recent electrification in rural northern India and, in contrast, the darkness brought on by cataclysmic civil war in Syria.

Why it works

Maps with a single binary theme, such as more or less, are understood easily and don’t require legends or other complex explanations. Using the Firefly aesthetic, this map maintains the sense of lights flickering on or off. The effect is actually a derived mathematical result of varying input values arranged in a raster grid. Desaturated imagery allows the data to jump off the screen, captures a sense of nighttime realism, and provides context without the need for many basemap labels.

Create an immersive experience

Requirements

Data

This map uses a series of eight high-resolution nighttime images, in JPEG format, from the Earth at Night Collection by NASA’s Visible Earth team, captured via satellite and processed to show areas of nighttime illumination in 2012 and again, four years later, in 2016.

Analysis

Analysis took a matter of seconds. The Minus raster function quickly compared historic imagery for differences in pixel value. A cursory visual examination proved the results to be fruitful and ready for thematic symbology.